Famous Programmers From Adleman to Zimmermann

View an analysis of 222 famous programmers who are revered in the hacker culture as respected innovators, superstar coders, and the heroes of the computer revolution. Graphs break down the projects that propelled them to fame, the number of projects it took to make them famous, and the relative numbers of men and women who make up this elite group of famous hackers.

A note on the definition of famous

So what makes a programmer famous? Inclusion on Wikipedia’s page of famous programmers, with the added requirement that famous programmers have their own Wikipedia page. This gets rid of a few programmers who were added for obvious self-promotion – I’m looking at you Blazie Engineering guys, whoever you are. Unfortunately, it also takes a few great programmers out of the running, like Brian Harvey, creator of UCB Logo and Steve Chamberlain of cygwin fame.

By way of a disclaimer, I made one edit to the page while compiling the data. Carl Sassenrath was credited for operating systems and algorithms, and while Carl is a great guy (and was actually my boss for a short while) who has made some great contributions to those fields, I didn’t think it right to credit one person for two entire areas of computer science. So that leaves 222 programmers who fit the definition of famous, and 400 projects that they worked on.

Famous Projects

Looking at the first graph, if you are looking to get famous, invent a language. Just over 23% of projects that famous programmers are known for are either inventing a language and/or writing a compiler. This group of famous programmers includes notables such as James Gosling (Java), Alan Kay (Smalltalk), and Guido van Rossum (Python’s Benevolent Dictator for Life).

Writing a game, writing an OS, and founding a company or organization are also activities worthy of fame and notoriety. A small, but substantial number of programmers made their name creating web browsers, authoring books, inventing algorithms, writing command line tools, working on new hardware, creating text editors, creating document markup or formatting languages, inventing protocols, writing databases, or in the office software realm.

Interestingly, 31.49% of projects couldn’t be put into a category that had more than 5 members. This is a huge long tail, and includes everything from coining the phrase “computer virus” (Leonard Adleman), to Beowulf clustering (Donald Becker), to being a coder on the IBM PC project team who wrote the Control-Alt-Delete keyboard handler (David Bradley). Another highlight from the ‘other’ category is Charles Simonyi, inventor of the dreaded Hungarian notation, and to throw in a bit of random trivia, also the fifth space tourist.

How many projects does it take to become a famous programmer?

Not many. 52.36% of famous programmers are known for their work on only one project. Obviously these guys have been involved in a variety of projects over the course of their careers, but for the majority, just one project propelled them to fame. On the flip side of the coin, there are a few people who achieved fame through their work on a number of smaller undertakings. For example, Lou Montulli is credited with creating the Lynx browser, cookies, the blink tag (ugh what were you thinking!), server push and client pull, HTTP proxying, HTTP over SSL, browser integration with animated GIFs, and being a founding member of the HTML working group at W3C.

What happened to the women?

There are few women in the ranks of computer programmers, and pitifully few that can be called famous. So few in fact, that male-to-female transsexuals almost outnumber cis females. The dataset includes 211.5 men, and 10.5 women of whom 4 are transsexuals. More on that .5 of a person shortly.

Famous women programmers are Adele Goldberg, who worked at Xerox PARC laboratory and wrote a number of Smalltalk books, Grace Hopper, a pioneer in the field who wrote the first compiler, Ada Lovelace, credited as being the first programmer, Emily Short, who played a major role in the development of the interactive fiction development system Inform 7, Lynne Jolitz, notable for her work with 386BSD, and Pamela Crossely, creator of SIMPLE for academic management of web pages and related Unicode-capable applications for teaching and research.

Also of note is Roberta Williams, who was only able to credit the women’s side with half an entry since she shares her notoriety and Wikipedia entry with her husband Ken. This is the where the .5 comes from in the men’s and women’s datasets – together the husband and wife team counts as a full person. They are credited with founding Sierra On-Line and writing and designing several games, including the popular King’s Quest series. Their story is partially chronicled in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

The 4 male to female transsexuals in the list are Rebecca Heineman, author of Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate and Dragon Wars, Audrey Tang, known for the Pugs Perl 6 compiler, Sophie Wilson, designer of the instruction set for the Acorn RISC Machine, and Danielle Bunten Berry, known for the M.U.L.E. multiplayer video game written in 1983.

So there it is. The most famous and revered programmers in our culture work on a variety of projects, especially compilers. They are well-known for only a small number projects, and the overwhelmingly vast majority of them are male.

[Update: There have been quite a few changes to the Wikipedia page since this article was published and hit Slashdot. Here is the version the data came from. And a big thanks to everyone who left comments and provided corrections. The article and last graph have been fixed to reflect the corrected numbers. Also no more trees in the background.]

The interesting thing about "There are 10.5 women, of whom 4 are transsexual" is that it shows that being raised as a boy is an enormous advantage where a programming career is concerned.
Even people who claim the M->F transsexual women aren't women at least have to admit they have an awful lot in common with women, enough to endure a lot of bigotry to live that way. So it's not something about feminine personalities that turns women away, or even so much barriers in adulthood; the killer obstacles are the ones you hit as a girl. If you can sneak past those, because your parents and teachers and kids on the playground think you're a boy (rightfully or not), you've avoided past the hardest part.
So let's raise kids carefully!

Intriguing blog post for sure.
I am a bit surprised that game creators are second to language inventors. I also would have expected those who founded companies to be higher in percentage.
The even greater lack of woman that normal is certainly discouraging. I wonder if there is any other field where the famous female to famous male ratio is lower than computer science.

There is no such thing as "real sex (DNA-wise)". How do you determine it? In humans a single gene (SRY) on the Y chromosone acts as a signal to develop maleness. But this is not for certain. There are XX males and XY females found in the general population. See also Intersexuality - the state of a living thing of a gonochoristic species whose sex chromosomes, genitalia, and/or secondary sex characteristics are determined to be neither exclusively male nor female. An organism with intersex may have biological characteristics of both the male and female sexes.

Let the sexist distinction die, please. I'm a normal woman (not an exception to the rule) and I'm a programmer as good as any male programmer.
Female programmers are as capable as male programmers.
If you think differently, please evaluate why you think that way. Most likely, it's a stereotype you have in your head. That stereotype in thousands of heads (both male and female) is what caused the fewer number of women in the CS/IT field.

@Sandy: The mistery is actually quite simple to solve. The reason that in your office 20% of workers are women and they are as competent as men is that as a general rule men are both 'better' and 'worse' than women. In the population of men you will find that more are much dumber than average and at the same time there are more who are smarter. Men are more 'spread out' if you will, women are more 'average'. This explains why there are less dumb women programmers and less geniuses as well, and why in an average office women cope as well as men. HTH.

Welcome Slashdotters!
@Waiming, minilo, Nigel, D, Stephen McCrea, Hugh Thanks! And fixed!
@Craig Landrum, simoncpu, Matt Conolly, Paul, Ralph, dvorak Alright I'll stop it with the trees then. In the future I'll also be more careful about labeling the graphs so colorblind people will have an easier time with them.
@Tina It certainly wasn't my intention to be offensive. I find it interesting that the gender split among famous programmers is so different from the general population and from the group of "normal" programmers. 3 transgendered people and 7 women out of a group of 222 - that is *very* different from what you will see walking down the street. I split transgendered people out as a separate group to show that difference in the gender split, not because they are "sexless."

Hmm. If you look at the wikipedia redirection you can see there was a debate over famous. As the title now suggests I think that wikipedia page is a list of programmers rather than a list of _famous_ programmers (which saves a lot of arguments).

Women are underrepresented because most of these guys became famous a long time ago when fewer women went into engineering. Therefore, it is silly to factor out the gender. Also, I would be surprised if 97% were American on the list, because significant contributions came from Europe and other places (Linus Thorvalds etc).

@Loz: My whole comment was based on facts, not opinions. Feel free to google for it, feel free to open your eyes and see it for yourself. As for the assessment of who is a good programmer - you missed the whole point. There will be more male 'good programmers' than female 'good programmers' regardless of the criteria you use. Mind you, there will be more male 'bad programmers' regardless of the criteria, try to understand it. We're different and there's nothing 'bad' in it.

The graphs are pretty and I like the use of images behind them, but it makes them almost unreadable, especially when the legend does NOT use images. The use of images means that each pie slice actually has a variety of shades, and when you have over a dozen color in the legend it then becomes impossible to match the colors in the legend to the slice of the pie. Sorry. Solid colors *do* have their place and I think pie charts is one of those places, since it makes them more easily readable. My 2 cents.

Its amazing how few famous women programmers there are. At my office it is about 20% female, and I would say there are as competent as the men.
Thanks for putting all of this information together. The graphs are well done. How did you make them?

It's very, very likely you have interacted with trans people, and just didn't know it.
Sorry if it's harsh, but I get tired of seeing this sort of thing every day.
Anyway, I'm glad you fixed it. Thanks.

Wow this is an interesting argument to focus on one or maybe two projects in order to achieve success. With so many distractions out there its difficult to sometimes focus on one thing for any extended period of time.

@Beth
Are you even sure they're all male-to-female? I've personally known some pretty amazing geeks who went the other direction too.
And more generally, I wonder how things would look if something other than gender was used for break outing the "essential categories" of humankind. For example, the degree to which famous programmers are on the autistic spectrum? I'd bet that gender is low hanging fruit in terms of how easy it is to measure, but it's probably not the conceptual core of what's really going on here.
Video games, programming languages, and operating systems are pretty "common denominator" applications for computers (wide audience). Programming inherently requires a sort of mechanical obsessiveness. And these applications in particular turn away from messy realities and instead are mostly about creating "inner worlds" that are strongly ordered and purposefully tractable to human minds - whether for work or play. Consider the lack of authors of meteorological simulations and bioinformatics tools in these results. Such programmers obviously exist. It was probably a feat to do what they did. And yet they are not famous in this way.
Instead of looking at the "objects of study" as containing answers within themselves, perhaps it makes more sense to ask what this list says about the uses and users of computers?

For those asking where CliffyB is... Has he ever actually programmed anything? Or is he just a "game designer". Being able to get through a few sessions of UnrealEd doesn't make you a programmer.
For those surprised by the famousness of language inventors, you might want to give the Turing award lists a look. They dominate.

I want to note that it’s reaaaaally offensive to list a transsexual woman under a separate category from “men” and “women.” I mean, Dani’s transsexuality is certainly worth noting; does beginning your career living as a man and later transitioning to your true identity help or hinder you as a woman in computer science? But please, it’s insulting to imply that transsexual people are somehow sexless, neither “men” nor “women”; it’s the sort of preconception we spend our lives fighting.
Dani’s a woman; when she received, posthumously, the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Lifetime Achievement Award, the highest honor in videogames, they honored her identity and referred to her throughout as a woman and nothing else. Wil Wright, a colleague, gave the speech in her stead.
Thanks! It’s a great article!

Completely agree that the large number of transsexual people among famous programmers is interesting. Almost completely disagree that reporting sex as male / female / TS is a sensible way of expressing that.
I understand that you're reluctant just to say the split is 211.5-10.5, because whether the sex imbalance turns out to be because of biological differences or social biases or whatever it's unlikely that M->F transsexuals are *exactly like* women-from-birth-on in the relevant ways. But ... well, let's just say that the only TS person I know well (who, incidentally, happens to be an absolutely first-rate programmer, though not a famous one) would probably be pretty peeved at being categorized as neither-male-nor-female.

@Laura: If you're a normal woman (as in: average woman) then definitely you're not as good as any male programmer, you're most probably worse programmer than a significant number of male programmers who are well above average, and at the same time you're most probably worse than much smaller number of female programmers. It's worth noting though that there are a lot of male programmers who are far worse than you... much more than bad women programmers. This is because women are more 'average' and men are more 'spread out', there are more men geniuses and more men idiots than there are women geniuses and idiots. This has nothing to do with sexism, feminism, any stereotype and all that politically correct bs, this has everything to do with the *fact* that women and men are *different*.

Hmm, you might want fix the lighting on that pie chart, there seems to be a lot of glare, and you can clearly see a reflection of a tree (!). If this was a picture taken with a camera, anyone would agree it's horrible. Thumbs down for lame, have some respect for your readers and stop worshipping at the alter of your gayass software.

ghrom, where on earth are you getting your so-called "facts" about women being overall more "average" and men having more above/below numbers? What a crock. Distribution curves don't work like that, especially in comparison across gender or other variable lines. Average is average, bell curves are bell curves.
What we are seeing here is a simple extension of the numbers: more men go into the field overall, so there are ultimately more famous/accomplished men. If the volume of women were higher overall, you'd see a higher number of famous women profiled. Simple.
Although, I think women need better personal PR in order to even get into the consideration set when these types of studies are being done. With women being generally considered more collaborative as workers, there may be a bias against the "female" work style (profiling individual vs team accomplishments).

This seems to have deviated from the original discussion about programmers somewhat, but hey ho, I’ll join in!
@ aruin est
If you think the 0.5 of a person was referring to a transsexual, then you jumped to a conclusion rather than reading and understanding the article.
I have to agree, though, that it'd be nicer to refer to someone who chooses to live as a woman full time as a woman rather than as a transsexual or similar. Anyone who thinks that things are as definite as there being just two sexes is rather oversimplifying the matter. Everyone’s at least a bit different, and while classification can be useful, unnecessary overuse can lead to discrimination against individuals.
@ Lawlz, Esteban
Sheesh, grow up.
@ ghrom
Do you have any (scientific) evidence to back up your comments? They sound distinctly like opinion, rather than fact. How would you even go about assessing who is a good programmer and who is not?

Some are wondering how few woman are in this list.
But there is FAMOUS, not BEST programmers.
And lets remember any famous programmers ( peep at Internet !!! ))).
I remembered by heart about 30. All are men. No one women.
Than I read the list. There are missing some famous programmers (after look at glance):
Mark Zbykowski - Every windows (and DOS) .exe and .dll files are beginning with his abridgement "MZ"
John Socha - creator of Norton Commander
Eugeni Roshal - famous archiver RAR and shell FAR

wikipedia is not the source of all facts. Nor is googling. The sample is biased towards whether people bother to recognize people in writing in Wikipedia, rather than taking a broader view. If you looked instead at a differently biased sample eg programmers who write books or do lecture tours, your result would be unlikely to be identical. Take a different bias where peoples focus is different - say the women famous enough to make the Ada Lovelace day list, and you will find that (gosh) no-one bothered to mention the men who do great things.
Why mention gender at all, why not just make a study that compares the number of language writers with the number of games writers appearing in wikipedia. Flaunting nasty figures is just pretty much the same as punching those of us who have been programming for many years in the face. Thanks.

Nice article, thanks for pulling us all together to take a look at this. I wondered why some people at some of my job sites focused on weird languages that had little chance of being used - now I know - it was their passion to become famous. hum....

great post, something interesting could be a diagram or a map of the countries the programmers are from... I imagine it's going to be the same as men/women with 97.07% american and the rest strangers...^^

Noting famous trans programmers is fine, given that there are far more of them than you would expect.
Classifying transsexual people as a third gender is not fine, it's offensive.
Or put another way, when you say that there are 6.5 women and 4 transsexuals, that's flatly inaccurate.
There are 10.5 women, of whom 4 are transsexual.

If anyone wants a good list of female hackers and other famous or semi-famous women, there are a few good and growing lists here:
Open Source - http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_women_in_Open_Source
Science Fiction - http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_women_in_Science_Fiction

Presuming that you're working from the list on Wikipedia (from a few months back) then you've missed Sophie Wilson (f.k.a. Roger Wilson), designer of the ARM instruction set, who is also a transsexual.

The article suggests that to be famous, you should design a programming language, write a game or design an operating system: if you are looking to get famous, invent a language. [...] Writing a game, writing an OS, and founding a company or organization are also activities worthy of fame and notoriety. Do that, and you might end up on Wikipedia...
I know of an interesting counter-example, someone who has no Wikipedia entry, yet wrote one of the earliest 3D games, then went-on to invent a rather innovative programming language, and finally designed a key OS technology for what is now the largest computer company in the world... Actually, Wikipedia has no less than ten entries referencing that person, yet no article. This is just one example looking at the requested articles on Wikipedia.
As they were pointing out on Slashdot, this is far from an isolated case. In many fields, people are often much less famous than their work.

I agree the article seems stereotypcially sexist. Especially talking about the transsexual as .5 of a person - that is just wrong. Intelligence and Ability are the same regardless of gender or sexual preference. You need some more worthwhile comparisons.

Why would you divide people up like that: men vs women...and even trangenders???
I don't really care if a famous person was transgender, I just want to know what project she/he worked on and the number.

@g, Beth I admit the wording could have been better. It is not my intention to imply that transsexuals are neither male nor female. Consider me more educated because of your comments.
@nykm Not sure that telling people "not to pull shit" is the best way to talk to people who are generally open minded, but didn't really understand your point. There are a lot of people in this world who have never met a transsexual, nor know how they would like to be treated.
In the end we are all just people.

Just to second the other red-green colour blind guy and say that whereas the graph's may look nice to you, probably 10% ish of the population will find them hard to read. Very good article otherwise though.

Putting 'Trans' in opposition to M/F is really messed up.
If they identify as F, and not genderqueer, then that's where you put them.
This is why tens of thousands of trans people go start life over. So people don't pull this shit.